Friday, August 21, 2009

New Garter Bar Video - Turning Cables

I love cables, but don't particularly love hand manipulation. I like to go FAST! I like to type FAST! and knit FAST! I notice that the typing fast shows up in some of my posts as typos.

You will find that using the garter bar and your stopper makes cables a lot easier and faster to turn. You need your stopper on this one. Without your stopper, the needles are going to move and getting the garter bar onto the hooks will be more trouble than it's worth.

A key concept in these last few videos is that you can easily put only the stitches you want to move on your garter bar. Here is the procedure:

1. Pull the needles for the stitches you're going to move all the way to hold. This gets the stitches behind the latches.2. Holding the knitted fabric against the gate pegs, pull the stitches you're not going t0 move - the ones you want to stay put - out far enough that that the latches open but not so far that there's any danger of the stitches going behind the latches.3. Push the needles from hold gently back to line up with the others.4. Hang the garter bar on all the open hooks and pull toward you - both knitting and needles go toward you and the ones in the latches stay in the latches and the ones behind the latches stay behind the latches.5. Place the stopper.6. Tug the stitches on the garter bar. Only the ones you selected in the first step will go onto the bar because the others are inside the hooks.7. Move the stitches as desired.

If you machine has patterning capabilities, like a punch card or electronics, you could use the patterning to help pick out the correct needles. Just food for thought.

When I say I love cables, I'm not kidding. I usually do them with the garter carriage or the ribber, and they add a wonderful texture and dimension for more of a hand-knitted look. I'd like to do a series of lessons on cables, but feel duty bound to move on to the ribber after I finish these garter bar lessons. So, it goes on the to-do list, which currently is quite long.

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About Me

I'm a lady CPA in Austin, Texas. My husband, John, and our son John write software, and our son Steven is at Texas A&M. I can be mailed at "diana_knits at sbcglobal dot net." I am an avid machine knitter and doing all I can to spread machine knitting joy.